I spend a lot of time thinking about what the next big Warthunder updates will be like, but today an intriguing question came to mind: Warthunder, being a game based on real vehicles, heavily depends on their existence to continue having new features. In real life, as we know, there have been thousands of military vehicles of all types and shapes, but an interesting point that we rarely consider is that, apart from the current vehicles that are released (only the most modern ones, etc.), all the others that have already been built are finite. At some point, Warthunder will have released all the military vehicles ever built, and will only depend on new releases, which are not so frequent and the information is generally limited, so they can be immediately included in the game.
The question is, when we reach that point, how will Warthunder behave? What will the dynamics be like? Comment.
There’s still hundreds, prolly thousands of unique prototypes to add to the game, especially in pre-war and cold-war eras. Warthunder could easily keep releasing new content for another decade, especially at this current rate of updates being 50% copy paste.
If, and I mean a BIG IF, Warthunder survives that long, they will still have the infantry mode to expand.
At the current rate of release, I think we are still years away from them running out of vehicles for all nations. Even just sticking with the current main 10. Let alone sub-TTs and future new TTs and Sub-TTs.
Also new eras, like WW1/inter-war.
Then ontop of that, they can go back and re-do vehicles they have added, but royally screwed up, like the Harriers.
Finally. prototypes and concept vehicles.
Then, once every single vehicle in the world has been added, and added properly. They can release War Thunder 2 and start again from scratch on a “new engine” which is the same engine as the last one, but just called something different.
(but of course, the gamemode will still be 100% identical with the same 1-3 cap points, on CQB maps that no one likes)
infantry mode makes the amount of new content to expand dramatically, the amount of small arms weapons that have been made is stunning let alone the copy pastes haha
and also expanding on combining the modes, like adding larger maps with aircraft, tanks, and maybe even naval (old to modern) in new modes that are full battlegrounds instead of just a single area where you duel for imaginary capture points.
Actual improvements to the game is too much effort for the snail. If they’re not gonna do it now while they’re getting a steady stream of money, they’re not gonna do it when they’re out of content to add.
Related to this Sometimes I think Warthunder should invest more in promotional campaigns to accompany major updates (really big ones, with less copy-pasting). For example, investing in promotion through streamers who don’t play the game, and not just those who already do, seems like a good strategy to attract new players periodically and keep the game active.
There is still hundreads of vehicles still to be added, and with the rate of the updates and copy paste, I assume it will take more than 10 years to have almost all of them.
Even if WT managed to have them all, they can still retain the players attention by events or historical modes. Imagine a nuclear escalation mode with no AI.